[This unedited press release is made available courtesy of Gamasutra and its partnership with notable game PR-related resource GamesPress.]

San Francisco, CA – March 18, 2014 –
Unity Technologies unveils Unity 5, the next generation of the
award-winning Unity multiplatform engine and development tools,
during its Developer Day at the Game Developers Conference in San
Francisco. Unity 5 brings a wealth of new capabilities and features
enabling all developers, from the smallest indie teams to the
largest studios, to create amazing games and interactive
experiences, and painlessly deploy them to almost any platform.
Unity 5 is available for pre-order from the Unity Store and
includes access to Unity 4 and all its remaining updates.

Unity 5 is a massive update to the Unity Engine, including
features such as the Enlighten real-time lighting system and
physically-based shaders that provide the power to render stunning
high-quality characters, environments, lighting, and effects.
Workflow efficiency increased dramatically due to the new unified
shader architecture, in-editor real-time lightmap previews, and
improved asset bundling. Audio designers will find a completely
overhauled audio system including the new Audio Mixer for creating
dynamic soundscapes and effects.

Unity Technologies is committed to creating opportunities for
the massive Unity community of developers to find success.
Therefore Unity 5.0 will see the launch of the integrated Unity
Cloud ad-sharing network for painless cross-promotion of mobile
games, and an addition to Unity’s unrivaled multiplatform
support with the introduction of WebGL deployment.

“Every time we ship a new version of Unity, we’re
looking to empower developers with technology that's more powerful
and easier to apply than ever before,” said David Helgason,
CEO, Unity Technologies. “With the huge additions of
physically-based shading, lighting workflows, a new platform, and a
new built-in method for user acquisition, we’re improving
Unity dramatically from both a creative and business
perspective.”

Unity 5 includes a host of new abilities, including the
following marquee features:

Physically-based Shading

Unity 5 will launch with a new built-in physically-based shader
system. It is designed to cover a wide variety of real-world
materials under all lighting situations and includes a vastly
improved workflow, from the art pipeline all the way to the UI.
Unity 5 also introduces full deferred shading and baked reflection
probes for realistic environment-based specular highlights.

Real-time Global Illumination with Enlighten

Unity has entered into a partnership with Geomerics to integrate
Enlighten, their industry-leading real-time global illumination
technology, into Unity 5. Enlighten is the only real-time global
illumination technology optimized to deliver fully dynamic lighting
in game on today's PCs, consoles, and mobile platforms. Animate
lights, emissive material properties and control the environment
lighting in real-time. Enlighten’s technology also brings
dramatic workflow improvements, enabling artists and designers to
work directly in Unity 5's editor to create realistic and engaging
visuals for all game styles. The technology is the lighting
solution of choice for some of today’s most advanced and
best-selling titles.

Real-time Lightmap Previews

In partnership with Imagination Technologies, Unity 5 will be
the first-ever development platform to ship with in-editor
real-time lightmap previews based on Imagination’s
ground-breaking PowerVR Ray Tracing technology. This exciting
addition allows for near instantaneous feedback from changes to
global illumination lightmaps by displaying an accurate preview in
the editor’s scene view of how lighting will look in the
final game. With this technology, artists can continue to iterate
and refine the look of a level while final lightmaps update and
bake in the background, dramatically decreasing the amount of time
needed to make artistic adjustments to scenes.

Audio Overhaul

Unity’s entire audio pipeline has been rewritten to be
more efficient and flexible. The first big feature included with
the overhaul is an Audio Mixer designed to allow highly complex
real-time re-routing and effects scenarios. Designers can take
snapshots of mixer settings for dynamic transitions between sound
profiles during gameplay.

WebGL Add-on Early Access

Unity’s multiplatform functionality remains one of its
most valuable aspects and Unity Technologies is happy to announce
its collaboration with Mozilla to bring WebGL and asm.js support to
Unity. Starting with Unity 5.0, developers will be able to get
early access to Unity’s WebGL add-on to begin creating
interactive experiences for plugin-free play made possible in
supported modern browsers. Attendees at GDC can stop by the Unity
booth to see a demo of Madfinger Games’ Dead Trigger 2
running on WebGL.

Unity Cloud

Unity 5 will also see the launch of the Unity Cloud
cross-promotion network, enabling mobile game developers to run
full screen interstitial ads in their mobile games, as well as
exchange ad units with other Unity developers, to unlock the
combined power of over half a billion mobile game installs for
free.

Furthermore, Unity 5 introduces many other additions and
improvements:

Unity is now 64-bit

New multithreaded job scheduler

NVIDIA PhysX 3.3

Easier and incremental building of Asset Bundles

New 2D physics effectors

SpeedTree Integration

NavMesh improvements

Mecanim StateMachine Behaviours

Loading optimizations

And many other improvements

Unity 5 is available now for pre-order from the Unity store (
https://store.unity3d.com/).
Those who pre-order Unity Pro 5 will also receive Unity Pro 4.
Unity 4.6, which will be the last major update in the Unity 4
cycle, will include the much anticipated overhauled GUI system.

Unity Technologies is demonstrating Unity 5 at the Game
Developers Conference at the Moscone Convention Center, booth
#1402.